Throughout this week, we're serialising an extended interview with Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company, and social gaming firm Digital Chocolate. He's already shared the formative experiences that led him to a career in games, discussed his time at Apple and relationship with Steve Jobs, and told the story of the founding of Electronic Arts. Today, he explains the recruitment and development philosophies that set EA on its path to become one of the biggest videogame companies in the world.
How did you find developers like Bill Budge and Dan Bunten? Did you seek them out yourself?
I developed a good network while at Apple, so I already knew Budge and Bunten and others. Budge worked with me at Apple, and I enjoyed Dan's work that was published by SSI, where I was a board member. Dan produced a very simple, fun business simulator, Cartels And Cutthroats.
When I started EA, I called up [SSI founder] Joel Billings and said, "Hey, I'd love to buy the rights to that game from you and make an improved version of it." He didn't want to do that, so I went to Dan directly and said, "Hey, let's make a new game." He said, "Great." M.U.L.E. came out of my interest in basically making a more fun, playful, graphically‑interesting business simulation.
I would also scour the games, the stores, and the magazines and talk to a lot of people to build the network. I hunted Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall down at their home in the summer of 1982. It was so hot that day in Palo Alto that we were all wearing beach clothes and sweating profusely. Later on, I hired producers and made them scorch the earth. I heard about one great developer in Illinois, so I told the producer to call directory assistance for each and every area code in the state until we found him. And we did.
Did you have any problems convincing any of them to sign up?
Yes, I certainly did not get them all. Some stayed with what other arrangements they had. I also picked some bad ones that took advances and then could not deliver, and probably knew they couldn't - even when they took the money. I went particularly hard after my friend Bill Budge because he was my archetype for the software artist. To get him over the hump, I had to end up giving him some stock, which is something I did very rarely unless you were an employee. I also did that for Julius Erving later. Every employee got stock. Every artist got royalties. I think I was the first guy to give advances against them, which made a big difference to developers.
In the early days of EA, how did the game selection process work? Did the developers pitch you game ideas, or did EA originate the ideas?
I would brainstorm ideas with my producers. They all reported directly to me, so in effect, I ran the product side personally in addition to being president and CEO. While having our own ideas, I really pushed for us to find artists that had great ideas of their own. An artist has passion for his own idea and will pursue it relentlessly to completion. If we saw an idea from an artist that we thought had great commercial potential, we wanted to do it. Great examples would include Budge's Pinball Construction Set and the music app created by Will Harvey that we branded as Music Construction Set.
The main product lines that were more internally-driven were the sports games, driven very personally by me, and the creativity tools that were led by Tim Mott and some great developers that he hired to make our tools, including Dan Silva, author of Deluxe Paint. We experimented across a wide variety of software initially. Mott and I partnered on a home productivity line where he built a really elegant and simple word processor I designed, and Tim's team built a home finance app called The Financial Cookbook.
The EA published M.U.L.E. is now available to play online as Planet M.U.L.E. (pictured)
Did you ever approach Richard Garriott to work with EA in the early days?
Of course. I initially targeted Lord British, and we met in 1982; he was tied up with a really bad distributor and wanted to do it himself. He had the brand power and guts to do it. A few years later, I made a distribution deal with Origin, and we distributed some great games of theirs, including Ultima IV.
M.U.L.E., Archon, and Seven Cities Of Gold are three of the most critically acclaimed PC games of the 8bit era. How did EA manage to snag all three?
Archon is totally my personal style of game, so when Jon and Anne proposed it to me, it was a no-brainer. It remains today one of the most elegant concepts and designs, not far beneath Tetris in the pantheon. Bunten and I resonated on what we cared about in games, and after M.U.L.E., his next game - produced by Joe Ybarra with little involvement from me - was Seven Cities. I think because of its historical aspect and commercial success, it must be considered his masterpiece. We all played that game into the ground.
How closely did EA work with developers to design their games? How much design input did you have?
We were all over the design details wherever it was necessary. Some projects, like Archon, needed absolutely no help, whereas I contributed key ideas to Archon II. In other cases, like One On One and Madden Football, I really designed the whole game. I was often the executive producer, sometimes the producer, and almost always a contributing designer and tester or, in some cases, the primary designer and tester.
In those days, I got a lot of attention and publicity for being the founder and chief of the company, so I chose not to give myself credits in the games, but I did an awful lot of detailed design and production on an awful lot of them. I pioneered the whole dimension of celebrity and athlete designers and participants and personally handled most of the relationships. Honestly, people began to ask me in the old days what I did, and I said my job was "to do whatever it is I cannot find someone else to do."
Did you personally have any role in the design of M.U.L.E.?
It was my personal mission to bring to market a more visual and playful business simulation than Cartels And Cutthroats. I taught Dan Bunten the many economic principles that are built into the game design, including supply and demand, economies of scale, the learning curve theory of production, monopolies, auction principles, and other details. Because of my understanding, when it came time to write the manual for the game, I knew the game the best, so I wrote the manual. I also did that for some of the sports games.
Looking back, what do you consider your greatest triumph at EA?
When you look back at the launch of the company, it is shocking and remarkable that there were so many unique things that nobody else was doing that turned out to be the correct things to do. Obviously, that is why the company became great. People work hard in all companies, but if you are working on the things that turn out to be correct, you become a winner.
However, beyond the launch I believe the biggest real triumph was my decision to aggressively pivot to the Sega Genesis and to make a bigger commitment by reverse-engineering it. This was an episode similar to Lawrence of Arabia taking Aqaba after crossing the uncrossable Nefud desert. It took tremendous courage, leadership, determination and execution, and I will never forget what brave souls, like my hero Jim Nitchals, joined us on that perilous journey.
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Check back tomorrow for the final part of Trip Hawkins' story, in which he gives his views on the present-day Electronic Arts, and whether he thinks the negative perception of a publisher which was recently named the worst company in America is a fair one.